Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Director/writer: Thomas M. Wright, Transmission Films.
A disconcerting film, The Stranger is about a friendship that forms between two outsiders. It can also feel desolate. It’s about an undercover police officer who puts everything at risk to get close to a criminal who may or may not be what he seems.
Producer and star of the film Joel Edgerton began to develop the project after reading the book The Sting, about a years-long undercover police operation to capture the murderer of a young boy. Joel’s character, Mark, is the detective who ‘befriends’ the suspect in order to bring him to justice. Joel’s fascination was with the psychological process of such an operation.
The Stranger is also a film about the toll such a case takes on the ones involved: law enforcement officers, the innocent, their families.
This camaraderie is a dream come true for Henry Teague (Sean Harris, The King, Prometheus, Mission: Impossible ― Fallout), who is worn down by a lifetime of physical labour. His new friend Mark (Edgerton, Boy Erased, Thirteen Lives, Red Sparrow) becomes his saviour and ally. Neither is who they appear to be as each carries a secret that threatens to ruin them. All the while, playing out in the background, is one of the nation’s largest police operations ― and it is closing in.
The encounter between the two sees one induct the other into a vast, influential criminal organization. While it offers salvation from a violent past, it also provides the promise of a new beginning.
According to Wright (Acute Misfortune, Everest), this is a film about a relationship between a pathological liar and a professional one ― a tightening knot of tension, lies and false realities ― as the central figures are drawn from opposite sides toward inevitable resolution or collapse.
It is a film about what is left behind in the wake of violence, and the structures that protect us from it ― about the people who take on the professional responsibility to come closer to ineffable roughness.
This is an ambitious cinematic work ― structurally, visually and psychologically.
- The Stranger has a theatrical release on 6 October
